1. Cloud Monitoring Overview

LM Cloud allows you to monitor your cloud services alongside your existing monitored infrastructure in LogicMonitor. The cloud monitoring strategy includes three components critical to measuring overall health and performance of a cloud infrastructure:

1. Resource Monitoring

• Performance data, such as metrics for CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and LogicMonitor Collector (Application, OS-level, and custom).
• Event data, such as CloudWatch Events and Azure Activity Log Events.

2. Cloud Provider Availability Monitoring

• Availability data, such as data provided by AWS and Azure status RSS feeds, measured by LogicMonitor Collector, and scheduled maintenance events.
• Service Limit Utilization data.

3. Return On Investment (ROI) Monitoring

• Spend data per region, service, or tag.
• Reserved instance offer expiration data.

Monitored data for these three components is presented in auto-generated dashboards alongside any monitored data for on-premises infrastructure in LogicMonitor. LM Cloud centralizes monitoring, alerting, and reporting and provides granular data retention up to two years.

How is data collected?

LogicMonitor collects data via the following methods:

• The application program interface (API) for individual cloud providers, for example AWS CloudWatch API, AWS EC2 API, Azure Monitor API, and so on.
• LogicMonitor Collector

Metrics from LM Cloud are presented within LogicMonitor the same way as metrics for all resources and device metrics.

LogicMonitor discovers your cloud resources and adds each resource as a LogicMonitor device. Datasources that are pre-configured to preform API calls and queries will be automatically applied to these discovered resources. If you also have a Collector deployed within your cloud environment, traditional Collector DataSources based on SNMP, WMI, and so on, will also auto-apply to these discovered resources.

All existing LogicMonitor reporting, alerting dashboard and monitoring functionality works the same way once this data is in LogicMonitor.

Do I need a Collector?

A traditional LogicMonitor Collector can provide more comprehensive monitoring for your cloud resources.

A Collector can provide OS-level metrics and application metrics for AWS EC2 instances and Azure VMs, which are not available through their Monitor APIs. For example, a Collector installed within AWS would monitor Apache running on any EC2 instance and traditional OS-level metrics such as Disk Usage and Memory Usage (not reported via CloudWatch).

A Collector is not required for LM Cloud. You will still be able to monitor your AWS and Azure resources via their APIs. However, you will not be able to monitor:

• Detailed OS-level, application, and custom metrics.
• Cloud provider availability checks.

How do I view non-resource specific metrics?

Cloud Provider Availablity monitoring includes many metrics that are not tied to a single resource (such as an EC2 instance or a VM), but instead indicate account-level health. These metrics include service limit utilization and cloud provider service disruptions or outages.

LogicMonitor automatically adds an “Account-Level Device” for each new cloud account. All non-resource specific metrics will be displayed under this device.

Which cloud services are monitored?

LM Cloud’s three component strategy (resource monitoring, cloud provider availability monitor, and ROI monitoring) does not depend on the cloud provider. Currently supported cloud services include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

How do I get started?

Start by adding your cloud environments into LogicMonitor. You can find instructions for adding your Microsoft Azure environment here, and instructions for adding your Amazon AWS environment here.

If you already have AWS or Azure resources in monitoring and want to adopt LM Cloud, read on here.